A young girl creates a bizarre, fantastical world in Jan Švankmajer’s unique retelling of Lewis Carroll classic
ALICE (NĚCO Z ALENKY) (Jan Švankmajer, 1988)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday, August 19, free, 7:00
718-956-1819
socratessculpturepark.org
Czech master Jan Švankmajer’s debut feature-length film is a unique and unusual trip inside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But this being Švankmajer, who began making creepy and fun stop-motion animated shorts in 1964, this is not a traditional telling. “Alice thought to herself, Now you will see a film made for children — perhaps,” Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) says at the beginning. “But — I nearly forgot — you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.” Sitting on the bank of a river, Alice tries to look at the book being read by her older sister (the figure is possibly a doll; the audience never sees the head), but Alice gets slapped, so she soon creates her own story in her head, as a taxidermied white rabbit comes alive and she follows it into a desk drawer and enters a weird, fantastical land where she alternates between being a regular-sized girl, a giantess, and a small doll. She encounters Carroll’s Mad Hatter, the beheading-crazed queen, a live piglet, and his other oddball creatures as she keeps finding keys that lead her into stranger and stranger places. She never smiles as her curiosity grows, very much a child with natural fears about what awaits her in the future. Alice gives different voices to all the characters as she narrates the tale, with all the lines identifying the speaker (“said the white rabbit,” “cried out the Mad Hatter and the March Hare”) accompanied by an extreme and disconcerting close-up of Alice’s mouth saying the words. Alice has constructed a dark world in her imagination, one that is not nearly as playful as the one created by Carroll. Švankmajer’s (Faust, Little Otik) use of dolls, puppets, and bizarre sets is impressively peculiar as the story takes grotesque twists and turns that are certainly not for younger children. Alice is screening August 19 as part of the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by a live performance by Brooklyn electronics duo Xeno and Oaklander, and Eastern European food will be available from Bear; the summer festival concludes August 26 with Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. And be sure to get there early to check out the summer art installations in the park. (Švankmajer, who at eighty years old is hard at work on his next project, was a major influence on the Quay Brothers, and you can see just how much in “The Quay Brothers — on 35MM,” running August 19-25 at Film Forum.)
“This climb has seen more attempts and more failures than any route in the Himalaya,” Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer says near the beginning of Meru, which follows two recent tries to make it to the Shark’s Fin summit atop Mount Meru in India. “It’s the headwaters of the Ganges River, one of the most sacred rivers on earth, the center of the universe. It’s this weird nexus that is the point where heaven and earth and hell all come together.” In 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk sought to be the first climbers ever to reach the top of the mountain, which features a 1,500-foot nearly sheer blade of granite at its apex. Scaling Mount Meru is more than just an extreme sport; it’s a passion and an obsession, and a supremely dangerous one at that. The film documents the two climbs as well as an extreme skiing photo shoot, and each time the men set out on a journey, they know that there is a chance that they might not make it back to their loved ones. Ozturk faces even more daunting odds; he attempts a second climb after a serious head injury with aftereffects that could kill him. But the trio is determined to go where no one has gone before, even as the stakes increase and their prospects for success dim considerably. “Meru is not just hard; it’s hard in this really complicated way,” Krakauer adds. “You can’t just be a good ice climber. You can’t just be good at altitude. You can’t just be a good rock climber. . . . It’s defeated so many good climbers and maybe will defeat everybody for all time. That, to a certain kind of mind-set, is an irresistible appeal.” In addition to carrying two hundred pounds of gear on their back, Chin, who is also a professional photographer, and Ozturk have small cameras, deatiling the treacherous trip up the twenty-one-thousand-foot-high mountain. The film is filled with gorgeous shots of the mountain and the surrounding area, but it is a beauty fraught with danger. Codirectors Chin and his wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi (Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, Touba), include commentary by the three alpinists, some of their relatives, Krakauer, and big mountain snowboarding legend Jeremy Jones, which emphasizes the tremendous peril involved in the climb. “I often ask myself: Where do you draw the line between following your heart and your responsibility to others?” Chin explains in his director’s statement, and the film does an excellent job of examining that critical point, especially as potential death surrounds them. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Meru is a tense, tantalizing look at humanity’s never-ending desire to go beyond all limits to bond with, and conquer, nature and its elements, no matter the risks. Meru opens August 14 at the Angelika, with Chin and Vasarhelyi participating in Q&As following the 5:00 and 7:20 shows on Friday and Chin by himself on August 19 at 7:20.
As Hubert Sauper’s We Come as Friends opens, a naked young African boy is walking down a deserted road, carrying an empty plastic water bottle. He smiles into the camera as he heads toward the blazing hot sun. The scene recalls Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy, a 1980 comedy in which the arrival of an empty Coke bottle, dropped from the sky, has a profound effect on a South African tribe living in solitude in the Kalahari Desert. But We Come as Friends is no fictional farce as a filmmaker, not a Coke bottle, drops from the sky to let Africans reveal how world powers are still employing old methods of colonialism to exploit, and essentially steal, valuable resources from African nations in the twenty-first century. “Did you know that the moon belongs to the white man?” a man asks early on. In the 2014 documentary 
In a 1984 interview with Gideon Bachmann for a special issue of the Swedish film journal Chaplin, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky said, “I don’t believe that there exists any form of art film that can be understood by everyone. . . . It is not essential for me to be understood by everyone.” Tarkovsky was referring specifically to his latest work, the 1983 poetic masterpiece Nostalghia, although he could have been referring to almost any of his seven feature-length films. Nostalghia is a gorgeously told tale of loneliness, alienation, faith, devotion, and the search for home and family, the first film that Tarkovsky made outside of Russia, in Italy. It’s also about light and dark, as Tarkovsky and cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci explore chiaroscuro effects, often incorporating candles to create mesmerizing glows and elongated shadows while alternating between color, sepia, and black-and-white. Written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, who also collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, the Taviani brothers, and many others, the film opens in a vast, dark, foggy landscape, where married poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yanovsky, with strange white patches in his black hair), who is in Italy researching a book on eighteenth-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, and Eugenia, his Italian translator (Domiziana Giordano), have driven to a remote church to look at a fresco of the Madonna of Childbirth. Inside the church, Tarkovsky and Lanci establish one of their key visual motifs for the film, long, slow shots that pan across vertical elements — columns here, and trees and poles later, with characters showing up in one part of the shot and then another, impossibly, without the camera cutting away. Eugenia, who has flowing blond hair, is reading a book of poems by Arseni Tarkovsky, the director’s father, in Italian, but Gorchakov tells her to throw it away. “Poetry is untranslatable, like the whole of art,” he says, a sly reference to the director’s first Italian film.